I'm still baffled by the audience for these shows. If you aren't working outside the home, you're running a household, working out of a home office, volunteering, or performing some other productive activity at this time of day. Who are these people? :confused:

linda22003

10-23-2009, 11:27 AM

If you aren't working outside the home, you're running a household, working out of a home office, volunteering, or performing some other productive activity at this time of day.

When it comes to a lot of people, that's a HUGE assumption, Ginger.

Gingersnap

10-23-2009, 11:52 AM

When it comes to a lot of people, that's a HUGE assumption, Ginger.

I guess so. After all, somebody is calling those numbers that offer free legal advice on your work-related injury or the ones that promise to start you off on your exciting career as a vet tech. :rolleyes:

noonwitch

10-23-2009, 11:58 AM

Ann is wrong about assassins coming from the left.

Most presidential assassins I can think of were just wack jobs, neither left nor right. Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore are psychos. Moore may have been an activist with the anti-Vietnam war movement, but Fromme is just from a group of apolitical psychos (the Manson family), and she thought she was helping free Charlie or some such idiocy.
Hinkley's family gave money to the GOP. He is a schizophrenic, not anyone with any political ties of his own.

Of course, none of those assassins were actually successful. James Earl Ray, who assassinated MLK, was definitely not coming from the left. Sirhan Sirhan is a foreigner. If he was working for someone, it probably wasn't anyone on the left. RFK continues to be a hero to those of us on the left. If Oswald was working for Castro when he assassinated JFK, well, Castro is not from the american left. Blaming the american left for that is akin to blaming the american right for the actions of Hitler. I know that neither MLK nor RFK were presidents, but they are notorious cases.

Crazy people try to kill american presidents. Most aren't political at all, they are just crazy. Some psychos are political-they write columns and get paid to express their crazy views. Sometimes they even write columns calling for the assassination of leaders of other countries.

linda22003

10-23-2009, 12:06 PM

I'm not sure how John Wilkes Booth would be classified as a "leftist" either, since he believed in the Holy Cause of Suthun Rights. :rolleyes:

NJCardFan

10-23-2009, 12:18 PM

Oswald(if you believe the Warren Report) was a self described Marxist-Leninist

John Wilkes Booth is an unknown only that he opposed freeing the slaves and was a Confederate sympathizer. You could make a case for him either way.

Guiteau I dunno. Again, could make an argument either way.

Czolgosz was an anarchist.

Truman's would be assassins were Puerto Rican nationalists so it's tough to classify them as leftists.

Fromme was a hippy so that speaks for itself.

Hinkley was just trying to impress a girl.

Each of these, though, have been dismissed as angry lone nuts. Probably right except for Booth and Oswald.

PoliCon

10-23-2009, 04:20 PM

Ann is wrong about assassins coming from the left.

Most presidential assassins I can think of were just wack jobs, neither left nor right. Squeaky Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore are psychos. Moore may have been an activist with the anti-Vietnam war movement, but Fromme is just from a group of apolitical psychos (the Manson family), and she thought she was helping free Charlie or some such idiocy.
Hinkley's family gave money to the GOP. He is a schizophrenic, not anyone with any political ties of his own.

Of course, none of those assassins were actually successful. James Earl Ray, who assassinated MLK, was definitely not coming from the left. Sirhan Sirhan is a foreigner. If he was working for someone, it probably wasn't anyone on the left. RFK continues to be a hero to those of us on the left. If Oswald was working for Castro when he assassinated JFK, well, Castro is not from the american left. Blaming the american left for that is akin to blaming the american right for the actions of Hitler. I know that neither MLK nor RFK were presidents, but they are notorious cases.

Crazy people try to kill american presidents. Most aren't political at all, they are just crazy. Some psychos are political-they write columns and get paid to express their crazy views. Sometimes they even write columns calling for the assassination of leaders of other countries.

She's right though - the would be presidential assassins do come primarily from the left - or they have been flat out crazy and seriously is there much of a difference?

http://www.tobydials.com/td/node/336

Assassinations:

President: Abraham Lincoln (R)
Assassin: John Wilkes Booth
Political identity and motive:
Booth was a Democrat, angry that Lincoln had freed the slaves and preserved the Union.

President: James A. Garfield (R)
Assassin: Charles J. Guiteau
Political identity and motive:
Guiteau was frustrated that he did not receive a political appointment in the Garfield administration, and he believed "that God had commanded him to kill the ungrateful President." Since we can assume that God did not, in fact, command him in this way, we must deem Guiteau mentally unstable.

President: William McKinley (R)
Assassin: Leon Czolgosz
Political identity and motive:
Czolgosz was an anarchist who believed that "there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality which allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor," and that he had to do something about it. Mimicking the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy, done for similar reasons, he shot and killed McKinley. Oddly, Czolgosz had earlier voted Republican, but the assassination motive was clearly as described above.

President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald
Political identity and motive:
Defector to the USSR. Earlier attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, who was "an outspoken anti-communist, segregationist and member of the John Birch Society." Controversy about the assassination continues to persist, and Oswald was killed before any real digging could be done, so we are primarily left with his identity (as a defector to the USSR) as the prime indicator.

President: Theodore Roosevelt (R and Bull Moose)
Would-be assassin: John F. Schrank
Political identity and motive:
Schrank was mentally ill; he claimed "that it was the ghost of William McKinley that told him to perform the act."

President: Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Would-be assassin: Giuseppe Zangara
Political identity and motive:
"In the Dade County Courthouse jail, Zangara confessed and stated: 'I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.'" From Zangara's own words, much can be taken. However, he may also have been mentally ill. (Perhaps anyone who wants to kill a president is a touch deranged.)

President: Harry S Truman (D)
Would-be assassin: Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola
Political identity and motive:
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola were members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Puerto Rican Nationalists, represented by Marxist terrorist groups such as FALN, who were responsible for scores of bombings in the U.S.; they were arguably the most active terrorist group in U.S. history. (Interesting side notes: President Carter freed Collazo in 1979, and President Clinton pardoned several FALN terrorists. Il n'y a aucun ennemi du cote gauche?)

President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Would-be assassin: Richard Paul Pavlick
Political identity and motive:
Pavlick was anti-Catholic, and he was also upset by "the close 1960 U.S. Presidential election, in which Kennedy had defeated Republican Richard Nixon by 118,000 votes." However, "Judge Emmet C. Choate ruled that Pavlick was unable to distinguish between right and wrong in his actions." He was kept in a mental hospital for three years. Will this be the closest we get....?

President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Arthur Bremer
Political identity and motive:
Bremer is an interesting case, one that would require more research than we're doing in this admittedly surface analysis. He hated Nixon, but apparently, he also hated segregation and bigotry, and he did shoot Democratic candidate George Wallace. He also clearly had mental instability. Why did he hate Nixon, and also Wallace? He stated "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace," and that his purpose was "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see." These are deep waters, and we'll have to give this one a pass for now.

President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Samuel Byck
Political identity and motive:
Byck "began to harbor the belief that the government was conspiring to oppress the poor." He attempted to join the Black Panthers. However, he was also "diagnosed with manic depression, a mental disorder characterized by both depressive 'lows' and (less frequently) manic or euphoric 'highs.'" He had left-wing motives, but he was also mentally unstable.

President: James E. Carter (D)
Would-be assassin: Raymond Lee Harvey
Political identity and motive:
Harvey was possibly mentally ill, but also, charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. This one doesn't count.

President: Ronald Reagan (R)
Would-be assassin: John Hinckley, Jr.
Political identity and motive:
Mentally ill, no apparent political motive (despite some absurd references to his connections to the Bush family).

President: George H.W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Operation of sixteen men working for Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Political identity and motive:
Geopolitical attack/act of war.

President: Bill Clinton (D)
Would-be assassin: Francisco Martin Duran
Political identity and motive:
From Wikipedia:
"Duran pleaded not guilty and mounted an insanity defense, claiming that he was trying to save the world by destroying an alien 'mist,' connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains. He also claimed to be incited by conservative talk show host Chuck Baker, who spoke on air about 'armed revolution' and 'cleansing' of the government.

In both cases, these are claims made by Duran. We would need more external information to make a judgment.

President: George W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Vladimir Arutyunian
Political identity and motive:
Georgian national who threw a grenade towards President Bush. Not quite sure yet what his motivation was. Pass for now.

I would disagree that the Manson family girls were apolitical hippie types. Manson was all about politics and he force fed his followers politics. What his politics amounted to can be disputed and discussed. On the one hand he hated capitalists (potential leftie) but on the other hand he believed blacks were intellectually inferior to whites (potential skinhead). Hard to call.

megimoo

10-23-2009, 05:34 PM

I'm still baffled by the audience for these shows. If you aren't working outside the home, you're running a household, working out of a home office, volunteering, or performing some other productive activity at this time of day. Who are these people? :confused:
The same deluded crowd who watch Whoopi Goldberg,Sherri Shepherd on the View and Oprah and Olbermann no doubt ?With all of these people without jobs these days their audience's are growing .Between Goldberg and Buhler they each share a part of a tiny brain .Their only claim to fame is they both have very large mouth's and little common sense .

PoliCon

10-23-2009, 06:58 PM

Looks like the lefties or crazy/lefties have it.

I would disagree that the Manson family girls were apolitical hippie types. Manson was all about politics and he force fed his followers politics. What his politics amounted to can be disputed and discussed. On the one hand he hated capitalists (potential leftie) but on the other hand he believed blacks were intellectually inferior to whites (potential skinhead). Hard to call.

Both traits of your average leftist.

Gingersnap

10-23-2009, 10:21 PM

Both traits of your average leftist.

LOL! You're exactly right! I'd never thought of it in that light before. :D

PoliCon

10-23-2009, 10:44 PM

LOL! You're exactly right! I'd never thought of it in that light before. :D